This invention relates to a system and method for self-teaching, including self-teaching of young children, including children having developmental disabilities. The system of this invention includes apparatus for sensing an audible word or command of a young child for effecting a computer generated response to said audible word or command, wherein said response can include a graphical depiction of the letters of said audible word or command, an object image related to said audible word or command, or any combination thereof. In addition to the graphical depiction generated by the computer response to audible words or commands, the system also provides audible answers preferably by a virtual teacher to questions orally posed by a child pertaining to the depiction displayed.
The main purposeful activity undertaken by young children is play. From a developmental perspective, play is often considered as practice for the child""s later roles in life. Through play a child can explore the environment and gain knowledge regarding the physical laws governing objects, socialize with adults and peers to gain important interpersonal skills, and use his or her imagination and begin honing the pathways for conscious thought. Thus, it can be argued that play in humans is a tool leading to perceptual, conceptual, intellectual and language development, the basic building blocks required for the formulation of higher cognitive functions.
For healthy children, very early childhood play is either oriented toward physical objects or toward symbol manipulation. Meaningful verbalizations may not yet be possible. However, eventually through play, the child begins to attach specific names to objects. Soon afterwards, more complex sentences are learned and the child talks to himself or herself in order to achieve specific activities. Meaningful self-speech, when activity and verbalization merge and the child can say what he or she is doing, is believed to be a significant point in intellectual development. Self-speech is eventually made non-verbal, and we talk to ourselves through specific mental activities. This is often referred to as self-reflective activity and occurs throughout childhood and even adulthood. For self-reflective activity to occur, one must be able to recall and manipulate specific memory events. The brain system that this refers to is working memory which is theorized to have both a verbal/language component, a phonological loop, and a visual imagery component, the visuospatial sketch pad.
The child""s brain is different from the adult brain in that it is a very dynamic structure that is evolving. A two year old child has twice as many synapses (connections) in the brain as an adult. The young brain must use these connections or lose them. Thus, failure to learn a skill during a critical or sensitive period has important significance.
It is known that the greatest period of intellectual development potential for a child is before the age of three. However, children do not normally start any formal education until age five or six, and infants typically in an ideal family only receive one to two hours of daily intellectual stimulation.
It would, thus, be advantageous to provide a virtual play and educational environment for children, including those children whose learning experiences have not been adequately developed, or for medical reasons have been slow to develop. Such a virtual educational environment would be advantageous for several reasons: developmental milestones may be achieved more quickly; the child may learn to distinguish between images and scenes created from multiple images; and it may give the child a vehicle for self-reflective activity and thus be a seed for the development of imagination, consciousness, and communication. One such virtual learning environment system is described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,815,147 (to Bogen, et al. issued Sep. 29, 1998).
Notwithstanding the advances set forth in Bogen, et al, i.e., virtual play environment, the potential of such environment has been limited by its focus on children with limited interactive capabilities, and the fact that interacting is preprogammed and not based on the child""s spontaneous behavior. Clearly the potential of such a system, which has yet to be more fully realized either by both children with special needs, or by children not similarly encumbered, has not been fully realized because of such limited focus (children with learning or physical disabilities). Thus, the Bogen, et al, system is inherently limited because of its failure to provide adequate interaction of the child with the virtual play environment through the use of multiple interactive input; and, a more varied or comprehensive set of learning objectives (lessons) to retain the child""s interest. Accordingly, there continues to exist a need for such enhancement so as to provide a learning environment wherein each child, including those with limited physical and/or emotional development, can cause the environment to react with it in some meaningful and responsive way; and, encourage the child to look beyond a possible limited learning environment to related subjects in alternative sources of such information.
It is, therefore, an object of this invention to provide a computer training system for self-teaching, particularly for young children. A further object of the invention is to provide a virtual environmental system for those children whose learning experiences have not yet adequately developed, or for medical reasons have been slow to develop. Another object of this invention is to provide a training system for a child of pre-school age, which system can provide an audible response to questions posed orally by such child with respect to words and/or images appearing on a video display terminal of such system. Another object of this invention is to provide the depiction of a virtual teacher on a video display terminal, who audibly answers questions posed orally by a child using the system. These and other objects will readily become apparent to those skilled in the art in light of the teachings herein set forth.
In its broad respect, this invention is directed to a computer training system having one or more input and output devices for effecting interactive communications with the learning system and a video display terminal for graphical depictions of the system response to the output devices, wherein the interactive communication is prompted by one or more user initiated inputs, the improvement comprising:
a) means for processing information generated by a user of the virtual learning system;
b) means for displaying on said video display terminal, information generated by the virtual learning system in response to the information generated by the user;
c) means for the presentation in audible or video form by the user inquiries regarding the information observed on the display terminal;
d) an electronic library of answers to inquiries which commonly arise from viewing the information; and
e) means for the recognition of words spoken in the user""s inquiry and rendering, via the output device from the library, the answer most closely related to at least some of the works and their sequences as presented in the inquiry.
While the self-teaching system of the present invention is particularly useful for young children, it can, of course, find application in the studies of older students and even in training of adults.